"There'll be much bloodshed soon," she said. "The Harkonnens won't restuntil they're dead or my Duke destroyed. The Baron cannot forget that Leto is acousin of the royal blood--no matter what the distance--while the Harkonnentitles came out of the CHOAM pocketbook. But the poison in him, deep in hismind, is the knowledge that an Atreides had a Harkonnen banished for cowardiceafter, the Battle of Corrin."~Dune

Paul of Dune was so bad it gave me a seizure that dislocated both of my shoulders and prolapsed my anus.~Pink Snowman

I had this great post all typed up and then my computer blinked and it is gone. Damn.

I think in all the visions Leto saw humanity was vunerable to extiction. He mentions three choices that I am not going to type up again, and I think they all lead to civil war except the Golden Path. Ghani and Leto seem to think that Paul fucked everything up, and even The Preacher seems to be fighting what he did. Not seeing the extiction event, Paul seemed to like the destroy Muad'Dib's godhead timeline. This and the other two seem to lead to civil war or people continue to play the prescience game till the species fucks up and we get Ixian hunter seekers. Everything going on in CoD points to a civil war about to happen. Basically my point is that Paul saw the universe heading to stagnation, tried to fix it and got cold feet. Leto saw humanity, if not dying as still being vunerable, and he decided vunerable meant dead. There may have been multiple reasons why humanity would die out, and the Hunter Seekers event was the one he created and prevented, because it was the most dramtic. But it was only one. Finally, he did not choose to exist, and if his existence was the lynch pin, I think the blame goes back to Paul for leaving things in a mess, but you could argue that he had little choice in the matter as well. I don't think Leto wanted to be the God Emperor, but saw no way out of it. If his craziness led to it, then he could have just opted out somehow and not created this future. I think the oracle creates the future by thier actions, not just seeing it. The Guild made a choice to take the safe course. Paul made his choices because he thought he had to. Leto saw many possibilities and choose one. The other possibility is that they are guided by Fate of some kind, the man thinking he controls the Oracle but the Oracle controls him. Now this is becomming a ramble, so I'll stop here.

I think he saw certain problems in the universe and did what made sense to do within the common world view - rise to power and use that power to change things for the better. What Paul learned very quickly is that the fact that one man even can rise to power and make changes was part of the problem. By achieving the greatest power in the universe all he did was to perpetuate the reality that pyramid power structures can never help to change anything. In other words, having a central authority can never fix the problems involved in the abuse of central authority. And so Paul instead became the Preacher, to preach against power structures and godhead. The main difference between Leto and Paul is simply that Leto saw the need for the Golden Path as a way to safeguard humanity; he invented a noble end for rising to power over others. And ultimately Leto's Golden Path was all about removing the possibility of a central authority ever again, and so it was accepting his role in the trap of power in order to stop all future potential for central power again, just as the BG lesson of staying in a trap dictates.

Paul's weakness, apparently, was his lack of wanting to look into the futures involving the Golden Path because it was too cruel, and because he wouldn't have ever chosen to go down a path where he knowingly was committing a wrong, even for a noble end. Leto, being a real Fremen, was capable of getting past this. But I wouldn't at all classify it as Paul having cold feet or being afraid or anything; rather, he was in a sense too noble for humanity's good - they needed someone rougher to get the job done.

He saw the possibility of the metamorphosis but not that doing so would save humanity. Therefore, he wouldn't see the need for such a thing to be prevented after he went into the sand, the Golden Path. His long rule may have made future humanity very weary of common rule and may have resulted in a scattering but he didn't know that this was preventing extinction. In his own mind he would just be an even greater tyrant and not holy.

Paul of Dune was so bad it gave me a seizure that dislocated both of my shoulders and prolapsed my anus.~Pink Snowman

Freakzilla wrote:I posted this comment in a BG topic but thought it might deserve its own.

I like y'all to poke holes in it... if you can:

... how do we know the GP was necessary?

Leto says so.

Paul didn't see it.

Now, I'm not saying Leto WAS the threat of extinction but that maybe his vision of one is what created the threat. There was quite a bit of time Leto spent in CoD severing all timelines except ones that lead to the begining of the GP. How do we know those other timelines didn't have extinction in them?

Just like Paul chose the Jihad over the end of House Atreides, Leto may have chosen the GP for similar reasons. But instead of saving the Atreides, he makes everyone Atreides.

Sure, he saved humankind. I'm not saying he didn't. Just maybe he chose the path that lead to extinction for the sole purpose of doing so.

In effect, the GP was a bigger, better prescient trap that he had the solution for.

So, back on topic a little bit, we can infere that it was neccesary based on the fact that he did not seem keen on doing it. He practically begs Namri to kill him, perhaps in hopes that he will not have to do the whole God Emperor thing. Four thousand years of being alone sounds worse than death. If Namri kills him, the BG would try to breed Ghani to someone and there are still Atreides. Or if he just lives and dies as an Emperor, he seems to have seen the flow of humanity extinguish.

Freakzilla wrote:I posted this comment in a BG topic but thought it might deserve its own.

I like y'all to poke holes in it... if you can:

... how do we know the GP was necessary?

Leto says so.

Paul didn't see it.

Now, I'm not saying Leto WAS the threat of extinction but that maybe his vision of one is what created the threat. There was quite a bit of time Leto spent in CoD severing all timelines except ones that lead to the begining of the GP. How do we know those other timelines didn't have extinction in them?

Just like Paul chose the Jihad over the end of House Atreides, Leto may have chosen the GP for similar reasons. But instead of saving the Atreides, he makes everyone Atreides.

Sure, he saved humankind. I'm not saying he didn't. Just maybe he chose the path that lead to extinction for the sole purpose of doing so.

In effect, the GP was a bigger, better prescient trap that he had the solution for.

So, back on topic a little bit, we can infere that it was neccesary based on the fact that he did not seem keen on doing it. He practically begs Namri to kill him, perhaps in hopes that he will not have to do the whole God Emperor thing. Four thousand years of being alone sounds worse than death. If Namri kills him, the BG would try to breed Ghani to someone and there are still Atreides. Or if he just lives and dies as an Emperor, he seems to have seen the flow of humanity extinguish.

Sure, but my point was, what if humankind wouldn't have gone extinct without Leto's vision of the GP? Like infecting a population with a virus just to sell them the cure.

Paul of Dune was so bad it gave me a seizure that dislocated both of my shoulders and prolapsed my anus.~Pink Snowman

Freakzilla wrote:Sure, but my point was, what if humankind wouldn't have gone extinct without Leto's vision of the GP? Like infecting a population with a virus just to sell them the cure.

This was sort of my question as well before. All we know is that Paul didn't see the need; we don't know why. Paul guesses that he missed it because he was generally avoiding dwelling on the paths involving him being a God Emperor. But of course Paul's guess could be wrong; the need for the GP could have only begun once Leto was born. At the moment of Leto's birth he and Ghani all but took away Paul's vision from him; none of Paul's visions involved there being any Leto. Leto, then, was an unexpected element, and anything new he brought to the table wouldn't necessarily have been foreseeable by Paul.

We know that an oracle can see the path another oracle leaves even if the other oracle is invisible; but does this hold if he doesn't even know the other oracle exists? Remember how in Dune Paul and the Guildsmen all saw a nexus verging on the final scene of the book, beyond which none of them could see the result? We assume this nexus was due to the uncertain result of Paul's combat with Feyd, but perhaps it also involved the unpredictable nature of Count Fenring's choice. Paul effectively didn't know Fenring existed, after all. He knew his name, no doubt, but not anything about him or his future. I think present information matters just as much to an oracle's abilities as does peering into the future, which Edric as much as says in DM when he says that prescience isn't a replacement for conventional sources of information like spies.

So yeah, I think it could be the case that Leto himself generated the need for the GP, in order to then solve it. The Scattering seems to have been a good result regardless, but Paul may not have necessarily been wrong in his reasons to not do it himself.

I don't think so because he saw the other options that did not lead to him suffering. If all he did was solve a problem that he created, he could have just not done it. Also, wouldn't one of the future Atreides have figured it out and called him on it if that were true? Also it seems from what was going with humanity in the first three books, at the very least stagnation was inevitable. Stagnation leaves the species vunerable to extinction.

"'There was no moral grandeur in my father's life, Namri; only a local trap which he built for himself."

This suggests that Paul did not see the extinction clearly because he locked himself into one vision, and could not clearly see the consequences afterwards. If he had been able to see it, we'd have confirmation.

(btw, I think your sig pic gave me a nightmare, or at least it was the person in the nightmare being weird. yes, I know it is Mohiam from Eye, but my brain made it a weird EyeGore supernatural thing out of it. Been reading these boards too much, perhaps..)